What Would Sully Do? Passengers Behaving Badly

You all know Sully Sullenberger, the hero pilot who safely landed a plane on the Hudson River, saving his passengers and crew. Sully is also an aviation safety expert and an author, so we went to him to find out what a smart pilot should do in today's tricky air travel situations.

You all know Sully Sullenberger, the hero pilot who safely landed a plane on the Hudson River, saving every single one of his 155 passengers and his entire crew, after the aircraft hit some birds and lost all its engines.

Sully is also an aviation safety expert and an author, and as he just finished a book tour for his latest work, _Making a Difference: Stories of Vision and Courage from America’s Leaders, _we got on the phone with him to get some travel advice. Because in a tough situation, whose insight do you really want? Whose voice of reason will keep you from panicking? That’s right: Sully.

What are the biggest challenges of being a pilot today?

We’ve gotten to a point where we’ve made flying so ultrasafe that it’s a real challenge to remember that it’s something that requires great dedication and great effort to do it right every single flight, every single day, and to be aware of what the risks really are. You have to remain vigilant, you have to have a great sense of awareness, you have to be ready for something that could happen very suddenly that could be an instant life-threatening challenge—and you don’ t know what it might be. It might be something you’ve never specifically trained for, like what happened to us. These things are really hard to train for—not only do you have to have enough pilot experience, but you have to have enough life experience to be able to figure some of these things out.

So that’s one of the biggest challenges that we face. Quite frankly a lot of the challenges we face now aren’t the big ones, but they may be some unusual ones. Like, how do you handle a passenger who’s behaving erratically? How do you handle someone who might pose a threat or might not? How do you handle a situation where there’s something ambiguous going on?

So how do you handle passenger who’s behaving erratically?

Most companies now have, in our operations manual that we carry with us, guidelines. In my company there were, I think, four different stages in escalating behavior, and when you’re ultimately at level four it’s almost like a terrorist act. So there are different written guidelines for different companies. It’s some help to find out, does this really pose a threat, or are they just being a real jerk? And that’s basically what you’re trying to figure out: Is what they’re doing really illegal, or is it just behaving very badly? Fortunately, for a lot of people, just behaving badly isn’t always illegal. But then just in terms of our humanity, I wouldn’t permit someone to behave so badly on an airplane, in this enclosed space seven miles above the earth, 30 or 45 minutes from help. Do I really want to subject my passengers to that for an extended period of time, even if the person isn’t being at that moment physically threatening, even if the person is just cursing or berating people without stop? Should we subject people to that? Even with the written guidance, it’s not always an easy call, and there may be some unpleasantness for people around them, because this one person’s behavior might not have yet reached the legal threshold [of when you make that decision to land].

So what do you do in the meantime?

It’s difficult now, especially after September 11; there are procedures that don’t allow the pilots to leave the cockpit except for only a very few good reasons. So it falls on the cabin crew to deal with these instances, or unless you have somebody else on board to help. It’s a difficult situation. Sometimes the flight attendants are large and male, but most often they’re not. They might have plastic cuff ties so they can restrain people if they become really threatening or dangerous, but otherwise you’re trying to calm them down, you’re trying to talk to them, you’re trying to get them in their seat. You’re trying to get them in a position where they’re not going to hurt someone else or themselves or threaten the safety of the flight. There are things we’re trained to do, but the repertoire of things we can do is a limited one. And it ultimately requires at least some cooperation on the part of the person we’re dealing with. If they have no intention of cooperating, then you’re pretty much left with the choice of having to land as soon as you can and getting help.

And I think some people in our society are not behaving as well as they did 20 or 30 years ago, I think we’ve seen a real shift. And also more people are flying, in terms of total population. So you have a wide variety of people in this enclosed space, and people seem to feel they can behave in public in ways that would not have been tolerated 20 or 30 years ago, and dress in ways that wouldn’t have been tolerated, and speak in ways that wouldn’t have been tolerated. That also poses some challenges.

Next week: Everything You Wanted to Know About Turbulence…or Maybe Didn’t